SYDNEY, Aug 24: Muslims who want to live under the Shariat were told on Wednesday to leave Australia. A day after a group of mainstream Muslim leaders pledged loyalty to Australia at a special meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, he and his ministers made it clear that ‘extremists’ would face a crackdown.
Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept that Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament.
“If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Shariat law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you,” he said on national television.
“I’d be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that that is false.
“If you can’t agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Shariat law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practises it, perhaps, then, that’s a better option,” Costello said.
Asked whether he meant radical clerics would be forced to leave, he said those with dual citizenship could possibly be asked to move to the other country.
Education Minister Brendan Nelson later told reporters that Muslims who did not want to accept local values should ‘clear off’.
“Basically, people who don’t want to be Australians, and they don’t want to live by Australian values and understand them, well then they can basically clear off,” he said.
Muslim schools will have to denounce terrorism as part of an effort to stamp out home-grown extremism under measures announced after Howard’s meeting with 14 Islamic leaders on Tuesday.
The prime minister called the meeting in the wake of last month’s London bombings by British-born Muslims, amid fears that Australia could be the target of a similar attack by disaffected members of its small Muslim community.
“The purpose of the meeting was to identify ways of preventing the emergence of any terrorist behaviour in this country,” Howard told commercial radio on Wednesday.
“You won’t change the minds of people who are hardened fanatics and hardened extremists. You have to identify them and take measures to ensure that they don’t become a problem.”
Asked if he was prepared to ‘get inside’ mosques and schools to ensure there was no support for terrorism, Howard said: “Yes, to the extent necessary.”
Britain, shaken by the rail and bus bombings which killed 56 people, is debating new powers which could include closing mosques where clerics are suspected of supporting extremists and deporting those who glorify suicide bombers.
Meanwhile, an Islamic youth organization that was not invited to Howard’s Tuesday meeting said it would call an alternative conference — on September 11 — for what it says is the 80 per cent of Muslims who were not represented.
Some 300,000 Muslims make up just 1.5 per cent of Australia’s population of 20 million.—AFP